I have done some workplace automation (building support tools to automate away stupid paperwork) and I've never ever felt contempt for the people I'm building tools for. These people do extremely intelligent work and make evaluations on complex scenarios - my tools only help them minimize the silly BS that slows them down, building layered tools on top of poorly designed assistive tools or breaking out greenfield solutions to help tackle problems that need to be done entirely manually.

I really disagree that almost anyone who has built tool assistance into someone's workflow will view their workflow as simple and view the employee with contempt - actually getting to know the BS they have to put up with on a daily basis actually deepens my appreciation for what they're doing. Sure I can cherry-pick examples that make folks look bad - employees today, even millennials, are for some reason allergic to learning keyboard shortcuts and will use right-click to paste. That's somewhat on them, but more on the company for not providing training time to teach better data entry habits.

If one of these highly skilled agricultural workers was given a robot that used scent to determine which fruit trees likely had ripe fruit that needed to be harvested - I'm sure they'd appreciate it for what it is, a tool that lets them concentrate on more important things. And, if we as a society are moving into a era where automation becomes so widespread that jobs are much fewer and far between 1) we'll waste a lot more time building freemium games or whatever BS labour sink society comes up with next and 2) we should realize that taxes need to go way up on the people still employed and UBI or other social services are needed to keep us functional as a society. Having too much productivity is such an easy problem to solve - you just don't do what America is doing and let it all coagulate into the pockets of a few hundred billionaires... and then everyone gets to live a good life.